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WASHINGTON: The Trump administration said Wednesday it is eliminating more than 90 percent of the US Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall US assistance around the world, putting numbers on its plans to eliminate the majority of US development and humanitarian help abroad.
The cuts detailed by the administration would leave few surviving USAID projects for advocates to try to save in what are ongoing court battles with the administration.
The Trump administration outlined its plans in both an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press and filings in one of those federal lawsuits Wednesday.
Wednesday’s disclosures also give an idea of the scale of the administration’s retreat from US aid and development assistance overseas, and from decades of US policy that foreign aid helps US interests by stabilizing other countries and economies and building alliances.
The memo said officials were “clearing significant waste stemming from decades of institutional drift.” More changes are planned in how USAID and the State Department deliver foreign assistance, it said.
President Donald Trump and ally Elon Musk have hit foreign aid harder and faster than almost any other target in their push to cut the size of the federal government. Both men say USAID projects advance a liberal agenda and are a waste of money.
Trump on Jan. 20 ordered what he said would be a 90-day program-by-program review of which foreign assistance programs deserved to continue, and cut off all foreign assistance funds almost overnight.
The funding freeze has stopped thousands of US-funded programs abroad, and the administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams have pulled the majority of USAID staff off the job through forced leave and firings.
In the federal court filings Wednesday, nonprofits owed money on contracts with USAID describe both Trump political appointees and members of Musk’s teams terminating USAID’s contracts around the world at breakneck speed, without time for any meaningful review, they say.
“’There are MANY more terminations coming, so please gear up!“’ a USAID official wrote staff Monday, in an email quoted by lawyers for the nonprofits in the filings.
The nonprofits, among thousands of contractors, owed billions of dollars in payment since the freeze began, called the en masse contract terminations a maneuver to get around complying with the order to lift the funding freeze temporarily.
So did a Democratic lawmaker.
“The administration is brazenly attempting to blow through Congress and the courts by announcing the completion of their sham ‘review’ of foreign aid and the immediate termination of thousands of aid programs all over the world,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The State Department said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had reviewed the terminations.
In all, the Trump administration said it will eliminate 5,800 of 6,200 multiyear USAID contract awards, for a cut of $54 billion. Another 4,100 of 9,100 State Department grants were being eliminated, for a cut of $4.4 billion.
The State Department memo, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, described the administration as spurred by a federal court order that gave officials until the end of the day Wednesday to lift the Trump administration’s monthlong block on foreign aid funding.
“In response, State and USAID moved rapidly,” targeting USAID and State Department foreign aid programs in vast numbers for contract terminations, the memo said.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene Wednesday night as an appeals court refused to lift the midnight deadline.
Trump administration officials — after repeated warnings from the federal judge in the case — also said Wednesday they were finally beginning to send out their first or any payments after more than a month with no known spending. Officials were processing a few million dollars of back payments, officials said, of billions of dollars owed to US and international organizations and companies.